2/18/2010 @ 6:00AM

Twitter, Google Buzz: Get The Whole Story

With all these new social media technologies, from Twitter to the new
Google
Buzz, we are about to enter a golden age of communication, one in which information can be shared with friends and associates with an immediacy and intimacy never before possible.

Wait. Haven’t we seen this movie before?

Since everyone knows that technologies often don’t work out the way we first expect them to, I was curious to see if the current enthusiasm for all manner of social-networking communications tools had any historical precedent.

E-mail, I figured, would be a good test case. Who today doesn’t appreciate the extent to which e-mail has become a two-edged sword, both an indispensable tool and a Sisyphean burden. How much, I wondered, did the early articles about e-mail anticipate how it would actually evolve.

Not very much, it turns out. The few dozen articles from the mid-1980s I read generally described e-mail in glowing and excited terms–much the same way that the new breed of social-networking tools is being championed today. The moral of the story should be clear.

General-interest articles about e-mail began appearing circa 1985, at a time when actually getting and using e-mail was, by today’s standards, extraordinarily difficult. The ability to e-mail anyone in the world, something we take for granted today, was still many years off. Much of the time, you could only send messages to other users of the specific e-mail service that you happened to use.

Even then, though, the Jetson-like appeal of e-mail was obvious. “Electronic mail is, of course, the wave of the future; it represents the synapses that will soon hold together all our society’s communicative neurons,” said one piece.

The most striking thing about many of the stories is the extent to which they assumed that e-mail would simply replace traditional paper correspondence, rather than acquiring characteristics, good and bad, of its own. So much so that one article predicted that an upcoming increase in the price of stamps would lead to a big uptake in e-mail use. No one seemed to appreciate how e-mail, far from being a one-for-one replacement of printed memos or letters, would lead to a dramatic increase in the number of things the average office worker would have to read every day.

One story in this vein noted how e-mail “saves paper and time,” since “128 copies of a memo can be distributed throughout the plant in less time than it takes to blink your eye.” It went unnoticed that the very ease of sending e-mail would result in many of them being sent.

Other stories seemed to assume that because e-mail involved sophisticated technology, that it would have a Mr. Spock-like freedom from petty human instincts. A 1985 piece predicted an entirely uplifting experience for everyone using e-mail. “By providing accurate communications, it keeps morale up,” one manager was quoted as saying. “Rumors and misinformation are a sign of bad morale.” And sure, he said, there would be the occasional e-mail joke. But not to worry: “It breaks some tension and stress.”

Business is all about productivity, and the productivity gains e-mail made possible were often remarked upon. Executives who were too old-school to “get” e-mail–like those who insisted on printing out e-mails on paper before reading them–were mocked as dinosaurs. “The hard part is changing people’s work processes so they can deal with not having a piece of paper for a memo,” one article quoted a consultant as saying.

A 1988 article marveled at how productive an e-mail-equipped executive had become. “He sent out a flurry of electronic-mail memos to managers located as far off as Japan and Australia,” it says. “He read electronic progress reports from company representatives negotiating a new contract. He immediately responded with bargaining suggestions and fired off another memo to a lieutenant, asking him to send data by Monday morning.”

In passing, the article mentions that all this happens over the course of five hours on a weekend–a taste of the way e-mail would end up making all of our time work time.

None of the stories I saw even hinted at the possibility of spam, which is often said to be responsible for 95% of all e-mail traffic. The same is true for phishing. And the modern BlackBerry or iPhone addict, who checks the gadget last thing at night and first thing in the morning, would have seemed like a silly caricature that could never possibly exist in real life.

To be sure, a few stories dialed back the utopianism. A particularly prescient 1988 Los Angeles Times article catalogues many of what we now appreciate are e-mail’s downsides: the convulsions that e-mail gossip and hate mail can cause in the work place, or the extent to which workers can obsess over sending and receiving e-mail. But such pieces, at least in the early years, tended to be in the minority.

Far be it from me to tell anyone not to have fun with the new toys being created by the social networking whiz kids of Silicon Valley. Just remember that when you read stories about how terrific they are, you’re probably only getting half the story.